As I’ve talked about on here before, one of the reasons I love MegaDumbCast is that as well as being funny and sticking it to bad, bad games, Kris is one of the rarest things in TTRPGs: a critic. Not someone who is negative, but someone who plumbs the depths and complexities of what makes an RPG good or bad.
I have a saying that goes “it’s always 1978 in TTRPGs” because there’s not really an evolving body of design thought. Partly this is because most people come into the hobby through D&D or something like it, and D&D hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1978, so they’re always reacting to the same thing. Part of this is because RPGs aren’t games, exactly: they are more like toolkits for making games. A lot of how and what and why you play depends on the people you’re playing with and the way you all agree an RPG should be played, which often isn’t in the book at all; and a lot of the activities you do in RPGs isn’t part of the rulebook or written down either, but things you do around, beside and outside those rules. It’s not entirely unlike how poker is barely about cards and almost all about bluffing, and/or having a beer with your buddies, or how bridge is more about bidding than play, or how Twister is about touching that other teenager you like in a socially acceptable way. You can’t critique something that exists beyond the text, because it’s not in the text.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of people writing about RPGs but for the most part the way that RPG ideas get attention is through games that become popular. RPGs then has few critics and many auteurs: artists that put forth a singular vision of what they think RPGs should be – which is then often copied poorly because the auteur doesn’t really explain the nuts and bolts of that, just tries to show through example. Kris isn’t that, and thank god for it, and it’s why he stands out so much.
John Wick is – was, I guess, since like so many he burned out on the low wages and went back to computer games – one such auteur. Not to be confused with the endlessly popular Keanu Reeves character, Wick designed games like Legends of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, which were pretty decent. He also insisted on being what we might now call Extremely Online in the first decade of the internet, where he decided to take the personality of someone who Knew Better Than You. (Something I have, at times, also tried on, I know.) He challenged the nerds and haters, and was occasionally right, but he also picked fights and acted like everyone online was by default an idiot, which meant you couldn’t have a conversation with him. It is of course human nature that if one is oft-criticised one rebuffs that by assuming the stance of the enfant terrible who delights in poking the bear. But too much of that and you end up assuming everyone is the bear, and you stop being able to read the room.
Not this guy
When D&D 3 came out, John went on an epic rant against it, with most of his complaints being ones that didn’t really resonate with most gamers. Specifically, he approached D&D as if it were a machine to create fantasy stories. He suggested a bunch of potentially appropriate fantasy archetypes and found that, lo and behold, he couldn’t make those things at first level, or at all. That was maybe 2001 or 2002. Now here we are in 2025, and Kris is making the same points in this weeks’ episodes.
I think this is interesting because I imagine that Kris is not going to be raked over the coals for this stance, whereas John definitely was. So I’m pouring one out for John for facing the opprobrium of gamers all those years ago.
The larger point, of course, is that this idea isn’t a neutral one. It may not even be how most people, over time, have approached D&D, or indeed any RPGs. It’s certainly not an assumption Gygax and Arneson ever had. In fact, Gygax explicitly says in AD&D first ed that the game is not intended to simulate anything, let alone fantasy fiction. Of course, intent isn’t the only thing that matters, and gamers quickly changed what RPGs were. But this isn’t just Gygax’s opinion. There are endless computer games and quite a lot of board games that claim to be RPGs and are mostly about tactical skirmish combat and exploring terrain, I have many on my shelf. Kris talks about how D&D is confusing because it seems to be full of all these rules that sound like it’s a boardgame about combat and doesn’t have any in-world referrents or talk about the story or fiction much, but it’s important to point out that for a large portion of RPG players, it doesn’t make sense to talk about those things because an RPG is a game designed around combat and moving through planned or semi-random environments.
This doesn’t mean Kris is wrong, of course, or that it’s unreasonable to ask these things of D&D. It does however return me to my central thesis: that trying to fix D&D is like trying to graft arms and legs to a hamburger. Although it lucked into being this weird hobby that sews improv theatre, shared story creation, tactical combat, socialisation and character/world simulation into one distorted – but compelling – frankenstein, it wasn’t built to be most of those things and we keep acting like it is. Indeed, it markets itself as being all these things. Just as a lot of people play and learn RPGs primarily as an oral tradition, past down from one group to another and that has large elements that exist beyond the rules and text, people have also come I think to think of RPGs as an idea that exists beyond what they claim to be. We know, in other words, that the image and the marketing is kind of a lie, that (at least for D&D and things like it) we’re inherently being sold a furphy when we’re told it’s a path to unlock epic adventure storytelling, and we will just pretend not to notice. We expect them to lie and forgive them for it, and we in turn accept that we’re getting handed a messy toolkit that we have to work at to turn into something we know will likely rarely fulfill any of those claims, but it will let us roll a lot of damage dice and kill that stupid orc.
Fig leafs are not inherently a bad thing, as long as everyone knows there’s a fig leaf. But I think it’s possible for people to buy an RPG and discover they’ve been sold a lie; doubly so if they buy D&D and things like it. And to look around and wonder why everyone else is happy with pretending so much, and wishing so hard. And I think this is also why it’s always 1978, because inevitably these people go “well, there has to be a better way”, and try to make something better.
Slowly we’re making gains, yes. But with D&D swallowing so many, and it still being how so many other games operate, it makes me wonder if we should stop pretending so much.
If you have met me in the last…twenty years or so…and got me talking about fantasy RPGs, I may have brought up Lord Fang.
As I say often, RPGs weren’t designed in any particular coherent manner, and are more a kind of congealing of different ideas into a misshapen blob of poorly connected things. Probably lots of things are like this, and we only think there is some design brain behind them, years later. I think we’re in an interesting inflection point right now with D&D and RPGs, and more and more people are coming into them and seeing them in situ, and taking a lot of it as it comes. That is inevitable! But history matters. It helps us understand and be literate about where we are now. And it particularly matters when D&D is being robbed of its context, especially because D&D is really, really weird. And nothing more clearly illustrates that D&D is weird than the Lord Fang Problem.
In the early 1970s, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Gary’s Chainmail rules system, heavily inspired by other wargames and particularly Kriegspiel, into what we would now call a “skirmish-level” wargame for miniature figures. You moved around on a dungeon map and the point of the game was to get better at fighting the things in the dungeon. Exploration borrowed from the Kriegspiel model where the wargame simulated the fog of war and the need for troops to survive in the wilderness, usually modelled in wargames with random tables. A forest might be thicker than you imagined, or supply some wild boar; a village might be full of fifth columnists or saucy French peasant girls. But since the fantasy setting of D&D never actually worked out or written down, Gygax and Arneson accidentally created a system where the only way to figure out what the world was like was to buy their books and use their tables. Early TTRPGs were not so much big changes in systems but gigantic hexmaps and tables to roll on, just as different wargames of the time focussed less on the core mechanics and more on what is the most accurate map and random tables to simulate the reality of a certain battle.
People talk about things like Vancian magic and the alignment system from Elric as if the designers used those things as inspiration and tried to mimic those worlds. In fact, they came up with the rules in advance and then looked around for things that justify them. Magic in wargames disappeared at the end of each match, and the way Jack Vance described magic being nearly impossible for the human brain to contain fit that mechanic. Certainly there is mimicry in the D&D setting. But it’s mimicking so many things. I argue in my recent book that its biggest inspiration was the television westerns that Gygax grew up with, most of which were set in the far west, so that the ever-present Comanche tribes were a threat and source of action and drama. That’s why there’s always a small village on the edge of the wilderness in D&D, plagued by orc savages. Vikings were of course the other inspiration for orcs. Tolkien invented the word orc because he found the word goblin to be insufficiently epic, but because he invented them and because his books are very much written from a point of view inside the world itself, he never describes them. Gygax and friends had to invent all the rest. Early orcs had pig-like noses. During the first half of the 20th century, travelling fairs would capture bears and keep them intoxicated, then shave them and show them as if they were mutated humans. These kind of orcs were common enough that one of them ended up in Return of the Jedi.
The horns, tusks and pig-snouts eventually disappeared, but the green colour stayed, and that’s Gygax. A cultural commentator I read back in the 90s said that in the list of people who had the most effect on popular culture of the day, most people thought of Elvis and The Beatles, but there was also Gene Roddenberry, and Gary Gygax. Because although Gygax was drawing on a random bunch of things, we’ve let a lot of these things become standards…and then are surprised when they don’t make sense.
More examples of the random design: early on, the system did not have “hit poitns” but having watched the Errol Flynn Robin Hood on TV one week, where the hero and villain trade blows back and forth in the climactic battle, Gygax added them in. The ettin, the naga and the hydra and the undead are mostly borrowed from the Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor and Jason of the Argonauts. These movies are also why there are actual dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures. Again, this is what Gygax grew up watching on TV. (For the younger audience, television in the 1960s created a system called syndication where smaller, subsidiary networks or companies like Disney, would buy up the rights to popular films cheap, and then run them over and over again, particularly in times children would be watching, such as weekends. The popularity of Its a Wonderful Life was due to it being snatched up for nearly nothing and run over and over and over.) Gygax’s childhood and adolecensce lives large; the rustmonster, the owlbear, the bullette and others were designed because they resembled poorly-made plastic dinosaurs. The gelatinous cube was invented because Jim Ward (who also invented Melf the wizard because his character sheet listed his Gender and Race as M-Elf, and Dwarmij the wizard, his name backwards) put a jello shot on the map one night. In they went into the rules. Not that there’s anything wrong with gonzo design! That’s part of what makes D&D what it is. But its important to remember that it has no real referent to anything that came before and the only things that have these things afterwards are direct descendants of D&D. And the best example of this is Lord Fang.
A lot of early D&D design, besides being haphazard and silly, was also antagonistic. As soon as the players worked out how a monster worked, the GM would change things to surprise them. There is a monster that looks exactly like the Beholder (another Harryhausen inspiration) but if you attack it it bursts into poisonous gas. Treasures chests are disguised mimics, and so on and so forth. During one early campaign (an “evil” game where players are just murdering everything and fighting each other), a player created Lord Fang, a vampire.
The 1970s was a big time for vampires, with Blacula straddling blacksploitation, horror and critical acclaim, Dracula showing on Broadway and Jack Palance starring in a big budget movie. Anne Rice’s best-seller, Interview with the Vampire came out in 1974. By 1979 there were so many vampire films that parodies appeared like Love at First Bite, and Christopher Lee was so bored of playing the character he took one role on the promise he would never have to record any dialogue (his character simply growls and hisses). Culture was now creating a sense of evolved subcreation: there were so many vampire movies, each movie had to establish which rules it would follow and which it would not. This is also where RPGs were born: as places where subcreation was turned into rules and tables, so that you would know what to expect but not exactly. Just as forests in Napoleonic France might hide wild boars to eat or bears to fight, you could codify fictional concepts down to table entries. And in this spirit, a player made a vampire, and because everyone knows vampires can turn into wolves, and bats, and fog, and can mesmerize people, and so on, the player’s character was able to dominate the game. The other players couldn’t stand against him.
Gygax, ever the antagonistic game “balancer” looked around to find the natural enemy of the vampire, and it was obvious: it was Van Helsing. This was also the era of Hammer Horror. Hammer Studios was a relatively-small budget film studio in England started in the 1930s. In the 1950s they found a way to make money from the new popularity of horror films, which also allowed them to reuse sets and costumes and locations. From 1949 to 1979 they made 156 films, more than three a year. They too enjoyed syndication and wide distribution. In the 50s and 60s, even young children would go to the movies to see four or five films at a time, some short ones or serials, and then a family film, and then usually a hammer horror at the end. That’s why D&D has mummies in it. Hammer also made their fair share of creature features beyond straight horror. I imagine every single week Gygax and friends saw a movie about going to a strange place and fighting bizarre monsters.
This was the cheap knock-off of the 1930s Harryhausen epic –
Hammer Horror loved vampires and the vampires always lost because they faced down someone who could make them fear sunlight and/or the cross. 1970s horror was transgressive in the blood and guts and nudity, but rooted in a kind of desperate fear of losing religious tradition, and the cross played a big part (even being a major factor in the 1980s’ Fright Night). So naturally the easiest way to defeat Lord Fang was to bring in a character class that wielded the cross. Enter the Cleric.
Before D&D, religion is almost entirely absent in fantasy. Conan specifically hates formalized religion, seeing it as a sign of corruption: their are no religions at all in his world, only cults, or his untrammeled noble-savage beliefs. Elric has crusades that have no gods to drive them. Lord of the Rings has no religion whatsoever, and it’s absent from the Fahfrd stories as well, and Jack Vance’s books, and the Earthsea books. Where it does exist it is sort of a homage to Friar Tuck: someone might refuse to shed blood and say a prayer before battle, but there’s no organisation. Or it is an actual crusade story, and the only God is one of slaughter. Arthurian legend is the exception, of course, but there there is only religion, and nothing else. The idea of a wandering cleric joining a team of wandering heroes pops up first in movies, primarily in Japanese wushu films, because it makes for an easy character note. There the character is a monk, which is also why D&D has monks, another thing that was glued on without making any sense in the world. There is a wandering monk in Beastmaster, which is also where the ranger class comes from – because again, Tolkien doesn’t say what a ranger is, so people guessed random shit.
And so the cleric doesn’t really make any sense. It exists only to combat Lord Fang and doesn’t actually fit into the setting. And it certainly doesn’t fit into fantasy. But nothing fits into D&D, and that’s part of the problem, because more and more there’s a culture around D&D and it pulls everything into it, and needs to justify all this madness, but never quite does. You now have to have clerics in fantasy, because fantasy is being morphed to fit around D&D, which is just a really bad idea, and makes more and more cracks form.
Last week I gushed about the genius if Kirs Newtown and MegaDumbCast, and how nearly every episode expresses some perfect truth about game design. Sunday’s episode did it again where Kris said that a fun part of D&D is trying to take the things that they IMPLY about the world and make up why things are like that in your game. (I’ve also argued that the popularity of early RPGs was in part because people were frustrated by how the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure books would screw you over, and how early text computer games were too hard – people created via frustration!) But he is right to call it annoying that D&D doesn’t actually commit to any of this. It doesn’t lean all the way out and say “elves are just a few vague ideas, so you can fill in the page” or lean all the way in and go “yes, it makes sense that everyone hates elves because they are better than everyone” (aka the Warhammer Exception) or “if Sense Alignment exists then cities would install detectors at every city gate”. It never wants to commit to anything; it is a game designed on vibes, and so a lot of it is utterly impenetrable or useless to anyone reading the rules. Which means it is a game so often taught as an oral tradition, which means the game never has to get better at any of this, because it can always count on the community to keep filling in the blanks and pretending the game works.
But it doesn’t work. It keeps falling over. I have a saying that it is always 1978 in RPGs because every day someone realizes D&D sucks and starts iterating from that point, instead of the field actually progressing and adapting. And D&D isn’t going to fix this. Orcs are now trying to be reborn as Mexicans in a way to try to stuff a shaved pig-man Comanche stereotype into a suit that teens want to fuck. That might be a good solution, but I think it is also a Van Helsing solution. Which is to say, they are trying to respond antagonistically to fix something their fanbase hates, without fixing the problem that led here in the first place. And each new reaction only adds more to the problem, and creates even more problems. So it only gets more goofy with each passing year, and more incoherent and more unable to actually do what it promises.
The more popular and important D&D becomes – and it has become a media juggernaut in the last ten years, something beyond all our wildest expectations in the 1980s – the more it needs critical engagement with its tropes and foundations. But D&D cannot and will not do that, because it has always been a nostalgia product. The one time it tried to reinvent itself, in 4th edition, fans reacted as if the game had spit on their mother’s grave. So it remains what it always is: behind the times, clumsy, witless, cloying and driven by a singular goal to to catch the unwary, seduce them into believing that clerics are a sensible, well established fantasy trope and that D&D is more than it appears. That it’s not just a bunch of goofy TV movies, Hammer Horror and freakshows pretending to be cool. And once it has them, D&D can bleed them dry, first of their money, then of their ability to move beyond it. At best we can only react to D&D, which means its shadow still deforms everything. D&D is a vampire, and it’s time we staked it in the heart.
I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.
This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.
How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?
There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.
More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.
Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.
Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?
Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.
Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.
I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.
And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.
Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.
Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.
Back in 2002 I met an amazing game designer whose name escapes me, because I only remember his online handle. He was working on a game I’ve still never really seen anything like: a game of competitive storytelling. And look if you know or remember the game, do chime in. Players took on the role of great legendary figures facing terrible crises and would compete in describing how their figure would solve such a thing, and then the facilitating player would literally mark the players for how good their story was.
Now, generally, in games of shared storytelling we’re not here to make it an issue of quality because we’re trying to encourage wild creativity, radical acceptance and strong buy in, so as to create the best shared experiences. But having set up that this was an actual competition, the game was kind of amazing. A bunch of really talented story tellers trying to outdo each other produces incredible effects. But what I also never forgot was that the game had criteria. Of course it did: it wouldn’t be fair to just leave everything up a judge to use their personal opinions. Players deserve to know how they are being judged. The four primary criteria in the game were as follows:
Tradition, which was about embodying who your legend/god was and their vibe
Honour, which was about making sure that you showed respect to how big the problem was, not punking it out like it didn’t matter
Glory, which was being crazy awesome in how you defeated it
Verve, which was a placeholder for good writing and presentation, but also engagement and intensity.
These are excellent criteria for what makes good roleplaying too.
Much has been written on what makes good improv, of course. I cannot attempt to add to that discourse; I don’t know enough and there are very good books about it. From my brief improv training, finding your voice, trusting it and listening to it, and following others with full buy in were the two things I remember being taught. There wasn’t really a way to evaluate how good the dramatic material the improv was producing though. And again, some might argue there should not be such a thing. RPGs, unlike the game described above, aren’t competitive. And yet, don’t we all want to do them better? And if so, shouldn’t we measure not just enthusiasm, honesty, engagement, collaboration…but also how good our words and stories are? And try to make those things better? If so, then criteria is going to be vital.
I have a fearsome supervillain in my supers world called Yes Andrew who encourages your darkest impulses
Of course, Tradition and Honour overlap a lot with what makes quality improv. I renamed Tradition into Duty because Tradition felt a little bit too much about mythology. The Duty is to the setting, to the character you built and the characters of those around you. You want to not just treat them as real but also that they are consistent. You want the choices the other players have made to matter and leave an impact on the world, so it is your Duty to acknowledge them and be effected by them. That is something you’ll find discussed in improv skills, yes. If someone mimes a car, you can’t just mime riding a horse inside the car. Or walking next to it at walking pace. You kill their established truth. So I’m not really making new ground there.
Honour is also similar. Although good scenes can be built around status reversals and games of hierarchy – classic improv tools – improv also is about recognizing that you can’t just imagine the machine gun to kill the imaginary serial killer. That’s not interesting. Glory I think does come up in improv as well, although I’m not sure it’s quite expressed like that. The idea is the counterpart to Honour: you can’t just imagine a machine gun but you can also imagine anything you want. The right answer is the answer within you, and like any artist the key is listening to yourself and letting it out, as big as you need to be. Some players of course always try to go too big, but a lot of others need help. I built Relics around the idea that you really can be as powerful as a God and run the universe if you want to, and I’ve been interested to see how many folks are reluctant to let loose both on the small scale of their abilities and the large scale of accepting responsibility. We actually expect RPG rules, most of the time, to tell us “no”. That’s what they’ve done for so long, on the assumption that if they didn’t, we’d just go straight to imagining the machine gun. We’re also told not to throw the campaign off. To be so into following tropes we follow the predicted pathway. And that means we have to unlearn the tendency to think small. Being allowed to do things. Which is part of that improv teaching of not feeling judged or constricted by the wrong answer.
And even Verve is part of improv as well, because part of learning improv too, because you learn about how to act, how to impart real meaning and strength behind every action and syllable, how acting is about broadcasting energy, as well as understanding how to use body language and space work to communicate the imagined reality. If you’re using your words to describe things then you do also need verve, and you need to understand that’s got nothing to do with being long-winded or over dramatic.
So I get no points for just rebranding good improv rules. Maybe half a point for expressing things in a way that don’t just feel like improv rules, because these are both good rules for writing as well. Things that your buddy who wouldn’t even think of calling RPGs improv might consider. In writing have a duty to your readers to keep things consistent and treat your art like it matters and the world as if it is real, and you have to honour the conflicts you create and not just flick a switch and solve everything. Bad things have to happen to innocent people in stories, and as much as that’s your fault, it is also your responsibility.
Which brings us, sideways, to that ongoing question of what are we doing when we roleplay? Some are absolutely not intent in making a story, except by accidental by-product; and many who create a story are doing it to live through it, not perform it. And yet, we are saying things that exist in a fictional world. We must therefore work within that sense. We can – and should! – follow the rules, and even consider them the first and most important thing. But we also know, even though it’s not really written down in any part of the rules of DnD, that if the GM says there’s a dragon in front of us, we have to act as if the dragon is there. So we are telling a story, or at least building one. We can’t get away from the fictional nature of it all. Some people prefer story-maker to story-teller. That can take the pressure off. And yet, unless this is purely solo, and even then, the story is being expressed somehow. As we think about the elements, we imagine what they might look like, sound like, feel like – that is communication, that is taking the story and giving it a sense of itself. That is telling the story. So I think it is fair to always bring these elements forward.
As I say, no real points for the new nomenclature (and it’s a very masculine, ancient Rome kind of word choice, I know). But these four things are easy to remember. THAT might be useful. If you don’t have time to read a whole copy of Improv for Roleplayers, or need a quick handy guide, you’ve got these four principles to fall back on. Duty, Honour, Glory, Verve. We could add an mnemonic device, too, like Game Violence Doesn’t Hurt.
Anyway, these four pop up in lots of my games, explicitly or implicitly. Maybe they’ll help you with how you play or how you create games or guide players to doing cool stuff. That is always the goal – and that’s true whether you’re designing RPGs, facilitating them or playing them, your job most of the time is to help everyone be incredibly cool. Maybe these four things will help.
Because there ain’t no point adventuring in someone else’s world, dog. For my upcoming D&D 4E game.
As The Elves Tell It, the world of Cellona was once but two kingdoms, the higher plane of the Feywild, and the lower plane of the Shadowfell. Then the Gods came, two of them, the Lady of Light and the Lord of Darkness, and sought to play their games upon the world. They created a third world, a strange and unnatural mix of Fey and Shadow, with strange reflections of the two. Elf and gnome were reflected on this new land as human and Halfling; and in the rocky highlands, gave birth to the stone-hearted goliaths and dwarves. Shadowfell beasts became orcs and goblins and countless wild things ran across the world and tore its inhabitants asunder. Terrified and lacking any sense of order and little gift of magic, the denizens turned to technology and religion, the twin tools of their mindless ant-like civilisations, to protect and comfort them. But it was folly, for this only divided them further. The Lady of Light sent her devas and the Lord of Darkness sent his tieflings and they drove the world into two, light and darkness, good and evil. As was the way, the division drove them to war and to madness, as they dreamed of eternal destruction, of weapons that would end the war all for one side – at the cost of the world itself, and even the Feywild with it.
The elves came and put an end to the madness. The Gods were banished, their followers expunged. The mountains were emptied, and the cities of men turned back to forest havens. The world below was grasped forever tight in the bosom of the Feywild, safe from Shadow below and Gods of afar. And there was peace, and order. Primal masters like shamans, druids and rangers flourished again, and magic, not technology, held the world aright. Even the dragons returned, for those who had the gift to call them. It is a world of wonder and beauty and whatever the cost, those who live in the plenitude of the great treespires know that the world is better now. Safer, richer, and infinitely more glorious – as the elves tell it.
Others tell a different story….
Some talk of deva and tiefling trying desperately to overcome ancient rivalries to unite against a new mad god from the Outer Expanse. Of dwarves sacrificing their culture to stay their extermination, and regretting the bargain ever since. Of the last few humans who realised the help of the elves came with too terrible a price, and were slaughtered and driven underground lest they poison Eden with their lies. Of Gods falsely imprisoned, lost and desperate to return, if only enough will believe in them. Of warlocks and sorcerers with magic that doesn’t obey the rules that elves say are unbreakable. And even, yes, they talk of elves whose hearts are not consumed by ice, and will shake even the boughs of heaven to make the world good again – instead of perfect.
Yeah, so I’m writing everything in lists now, because that’s where the money is. Sue me. Also, for context it’s worth pointing out that I don’t like most computer games. As in, find them literally unplayable. So when a computer game makes a dent in that, it’s a big deal. Context.
Conclave is an asynchronous D&D-inspired fantasy RPG in the mould of the old SSI games. You can find it at http://www.playconclave.com and you and three (maybe four?) buddies can team up and play through a pretty awesome fantasy campaign on any device that can run the internet – it doesn’t even use java. If you’re yearning for some old-school RPGing in your life but are worn down by the tyrannies of time and distance, this could be your port of call. But it’s not just Tiny Adventures all over again. It’s much, much better than that. Here’s why.
1. It’s free, for real
Tiny Adventures and other social media type games are free but they don’t want to be. They want to go viral and sell numbers, so they want all your friends to play. Others want to sell you microtransactions, to get all the extra goodies. Conclave doesn’t have any of that. You can pay for it, but it’s a single (cheap) transaction to get the full version, but so far we haven’t seen a need to. What’s more, if just one person in your team pays, the whole team can unlock things. Not only does this suit my budget (and everyone’s budget) this fact filters through every aspect of the game design. It also makes it easier to sell to your friends: it’s not going to cost them anything, and it’s not going to drive all their friends on facebook mad asking them to join.
2. It’s team-based but asynchronous
The game can be played solo, but it thrives in team play – the classes are nicely complimentary (see the below for more), and the text chat supports conversation, as does the cool voting system when the story branches in different directions. This is, as mentioned, an artifact of being really free – facebook games want all your friends to play with you, which could never work for hundreds of them, so when you’re playing Marvel Heroes, you’re always alone. But in Conclave you’re very much both a team of heroes and a group of gamers, sharing an experience, which pulls it closer to the D&D feel. But unlike linking up to play Diablo or D&D online, this is asynchronous. Once everyone has had an attack (or a vote on a story choice), the game will start a new round, and if you’re a bit late getting back on line, your friends can just act before you that round (although that might not be tactically sound). Got a friend who can’t play at your rate? The game will automove you if you are offline for more than 24 hours. Going away for a while and don’t want the game to do that? Set it to vacation mode to wait for you to return. It can accommodate all paces, so you can all share the fun.
3. The system is very good
Some might say this is a no-brainer, or that it’s most kept invisible, but the system the computer is running is a really solid RPG system – so much so it would definitely be worth playing off-line. It has the D&D 4E cleverness of making every ability interesting, but without going over the top, and of focussing on status effects, but not being crippled by them. Like 3E and WFRP, it breaks down into minor and major actions, some of which have the 4E conceit of only triggering once (or twice) per encounter, or only when wounded or acquiring some other status. In the few cases where it might get as fiddly as 4E with all the effects, it doesn’t because a) the computer is doing them and b) they’re almost all elegant and simple, just a single modifier or such. Yet in this simplicity the choices are extremely meaningful, especially because you can’t win an encounter (in fact, you must restart it) if even one party member dies. This nicely balances out the advantage of having extra party members and keeps the tension high and the tactical choices extremely weighty. Sometimes, who moves precisely when will change everything, and that’s fantastically engaging.
4. The character building is strong
Characters have a familiar race/class build, but both options are strong and have options within. Niche protection is high, and the standard roles of 4E/MMOs are present, but in a way that has a new feel to it. Clerics (Buffers) are now Beacons, which means their role as a “leader” (as it was in 4E) is built into their in-setting explanation, and provides them with Warlord-esque ways of leading others to greatness. The fighter is the Vanguard who is basically the tank, but not in such a way that he can sit on the front lines without thought, especially at low levels. The rogue, runecaster and truebow are the striker-types: high damage, low squish, but in different ways from each other. Extra skills unique to each class add to make each feel distinct, as does weapon access. It is hard to make a pole-arm vanguard as a result (Beacons have that option) but you can respec if you go down a dead-end and with a simple but decently sized trait list, no two Beacons need to feel the same. Races too, are strong archetypes but with a new twist: the lumyn and the nix are mostly just high elves and gnomey-halflings, but then we have the chameleonic stealthy lizardmen, the satyr-esque wood-elf-sort-of-trollish trow and the gigantic living furnaces of the forgeborn (not like warforged; more like klingon-Azers)
5. The writing is fantastic throughout
I’ve played Mass Effect and Dragon Age and Guild Wars and more, and this is the best writing I’ve ever seen in a CRPG. The world design is elegant and clever: for hundreds of years, empires have fallen, one after the other, until only Bastion was left, the last free city, which just so happens to be where your characters come from. Why they’ve fallen and who caused it is still becoming clear; the game does not make the mistake of doing infodumps about the world but reveals it in elegant inches, as you explore and gain allies and respect, but at the same time never makes you feel small. One lovely twist is that whatever force of darkness is out there has taken away the ability to dream – except in rare, magically important situations: a perfect macguffin to draw your PCs into the story, and to trigger lovely subplots (like the cult that develops around another Dreamer who believes his nightmares have made him a messiah). It’s not just the structure and world that are well written though: the characters and language are vivid and direct, and each quest or scene introduced with short, clear vignettes that deliver powerful emotion and clear goals in the minimum of words, then vanish – just like a good GM should do.
And that’s the real glory of Conclave: it is the best D&D game I’ve ever been in, including all the ones I’ve played on the tabletop, because it feels like a tabletop game, and what’s more, one being run by an excellent GM. Here is a CRPG that hasn’t tried to reinvent the wheel but rather taken all the best lessons on good GMing from the table, and implemented them as elegantly as possible on computer, and then stepped aside to let you fill in the blanks. It’s not, of course, an RPG. You don’t get to act in character or make any choices you want. On the other hand, if you do that in the textbox, it is as much an RPG as anything Gygax ever wrote, and certainly as much as anything from SSI was, or even Planescape: Torment was. So-called narrative control and on-screen dialogue does not necessarily the RPG experience make, and if you’ve found things like Dragon Age to be glorified adventure games that don’t feel anything at all like gathering around a table to match wits with hideous enemies in dungeons foul, then all is not lost. Conclave is here, and it is OFF THE GODDAMN HOOK. If it was any more D&D, it would make cheetoes shoot out of your screen, plus you can play it on your goddamn phone, even if your buddies are at the North Pole.
Chris Sims, he of the Invincible Superblog (IIRC), was asked for his favourite D&D setting and names Freeport (scroll down). He goes on to say it:
“has the funniest jokes in the sourcebooks”.
I’m going to assume that instead of being a reference to Jody’s awesome line of cannibal children jokes, he’s talking about my extremely oblique “snakes on a plane” gag in the write up of the Temple of Yig. 😀
D-Constructions 
